The role of perceived minority-group status in the conspiracy beliefs of factual majority groups

The paper, in plain language

Feeling versus being

In the first study, we surveyed 2,140 people across the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and Poland. The consistent pattern: perceived minority-group status, rather than factual group membership, was most reliably related to susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation. Strikingly, the link was strongest among people who factually belonged to the majority — men who saw themselves as a gender minority, for instance, were more susceptible, while factual minority status often showed the opposite pattern.

An experiment that honestly failed

In a second, preregistered study with 1,823 US men, we tried to induce the feeling experimentally with a video claiming men were becoming a minority in education and the workforce. The manipulation did not move conspiracy beliefs — a null we report as such. The preregistered correlational analyses, however, confirmed the pattern: men who felt like a gender minority held more gender-related conspiracy beliefs and a stronger general conspiracy mentality, with the sense that one's group identity is threatened by the system as the strongest mediating path. Perceiving lost power and influence mattered more than perceiving lost numbers.

Why it matters

Much conspiracy politics is majority grievance: narratives that tell dominant groups they are becoming strangers in their own country. This work shows the psychological soil those narratives grow in — a felt, not factual, minority position — and connects directly to our findings on the 'great replacement' narrative and relative deprivation. The causal arrow remains open; the correlational pattern, across four countries, is consistent.